Soviet materialities: Socialist things, environments and affects

by Mollie Arbuthnot (Editor), Christianna Bonin (Editor), Gabriella Ferrari (Editor)

Overview

Soviet materialities explores how material transforms our understanding of Soviet culture, from the textures of domestic space in 1960s apartment blocks to Gulag labour on the Moscow canal, and from avant-garde literary theory in the 1920s to conceptual art under perestroika. It starts from the ethos that the material world shapes people and society. Taking a material approach—or a range of material approaches—can therefore illuminate aspects of the cultural production and lived experiences of Soviet socialism that are not reflected in other kinds of historical records. This edited volume brings cutting-edge research by emerging scholars together with the established voices who have broken the ground in this sub-field over the last twenty years and promises to make a major intervention in the study of Soviet history and culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526182128
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2026
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.45(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mollie Arbuthnot is Assistant Professor of History at Nazarbayev University
Christianna Bonin is Assistant Professor of Art History and Theory at American University of Sharjah
Gabriella A. Ferrari is an independent scholar of Russian and Soviet visual culture

Table of Contents

Introduction — Mollie Arbuthnot, Christianna Bonin, and Gabriella A. Ferrari

PART I: LAND, WATER, ECOLOGIES
1 ‘And stones speak!’: mapping, mosaics, and the Soviet materiality of wonder — Christianna Bonin
2 Moving matters: Turksib and its orientations — Anel Rakhimzhanova
3 Seas of material residues, or diving into the wayward archive of the Moscow Canal — Nastia Volynova
4 Embodied nature: landscape as architecture during the Thaw — Masha Panteleyeva

5 Reflection: The materialism of Soviet stones, liquids, and landscapes — Andy Bruno

PART II: WORDS, MATTER, MIND
6 The livingness of texts in Vladimir Sorokin and Dmitrii Prigov’s literature and performance art — Katerina Pavlidi
7 Kruchenykh’s explosive texts: elemental anarchy in the gelatine press and the gelatine bomb — Kamila Kocialkowska
8 Formalists-Materialists — Lidia Tripiccione
9 The vanishing brains of the Soviet Pantheon and the vexing question of the materiality of Soviet subjects — Jamie Phillips

10 Reflection: Wordy things, thingly signs, and other points of transfer — Serguei Alex. Oushakine

PART III: THINGS IN TIME
11 A building containing the universe: between heritage and atheism in late Soviet Tashkent — Mollie Arbuthnot
12 Things of life in times of extremes: survival materialities during the Soviet famines in Ukraine — Iryna Skubii
13 How did material culture matter in the Khrushchev-era USSR? Everyday aesthetics and the socialist culture of things — Susan E. Reid
14 Reprocessing and resurfacing reality: reworking the everyday and the avant-garde in the artistic laboratory of Irina Nakhova — Gabriella A. Ferrari

15 Reflection: One does not kiss a monument of ancient art: Russian Orthodox icons and the abducted materiality of modernity — Alexey Golubev

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